Posted
by
Soulskillon Saturday July 19, 2014 @03:31PM
from the but-amazon's-not-driving-writing-to-the-hospital dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Amazon has been struggling for pricecontrol of the book and ebook markets for years, battling publicly and privately with publishers while making a lot of authors nervous. With yesterday's announcement of "Kindle Unlimited," a Netflix-like ebook subscription service, Amazon is reaching their endgame in disrupting the book-selling business. But there are other companies doing the same thing, and an article at TechCrunch makes the case that it's the general market, rather than any company in particular, that's making it harder for authors to earn a living. "Driving the prices lower isn't likely to expand the market of readers, since book prices don't seem to be the deciding factor on whether someone reads a book (time is). But those lower prices directly shrink the incomes of authors, who lack any other means of translating their sales into additional revenue. That's why I don't think the big revolution for writers and other content producers will come from Amazon, but rather from startups like Patreon, which allow producers to build audiences directly and develop their own direct subscription model with their most fervent fans."

people want entertainment that is not formulaic & trite more than ever

the ***ONY*** reasons authors, musicians, journalists and other "content creators" are suffering is because of:

***bad business management of the companies they work for***

these unscrupulous business managers are trained to understand "business" and "profit" as ONLY SHORT TERM METRICS that are abstracted into more "numbers" that they have to "hit"

it's based on the **incorrect** concept that people don't care if their journalism, art, music is quality or not...they cynically assume that people will watch whatever is on TV, read whatver books are put in front of them, and listen to trite, predictable music indefinitely

ITS NOT TRUE

people want variety, they notice repetition...

the only reason is that we, as consumers, have been conditioned by bullshit marketing to have ***REDUCED EXPECTATIONS OF VALUE***

You are over generalizing. There has been, and likely will be, a market for high quality entertainment - both written word, movies, music. A problem is that this market isn't especially large nor lucrative.

The big money is in mediocre crap. Always has been.

What the Internet has done is to throw everything together into a large fungible pool of confusion. And the big actors are well financed corps, not individual artists. Just like always.

It always has been a struggle for an artist of whatever stripe to make a living (at least while they're alive). There are the high profile exceptions, but the majority of artists don't make big bucks.

You are over generalizing. There has been, and likely will be, a market for high quality entertainment - both written word, movies, music. A problem is that this market isn't especially large nor lucrative.

The big money is in mediocre crap. Always has been.

You're kind of putting the cart before the horse here. Marketing costs enormous amounts of money but it is effective, that's why publishers keep paying for it. People buy because of the marketing as much as the content.

So if you were a publisher would you prefer to put all that money behind a) a formulaic, uninspired but proven work or b) a new, exciting, but unproven creation? There's a good reason they keep making remakes of remakes.

If new and original content were to benefit from the kind of marketing mu

Using your argument though, most popular TV shows according to that wiki list vs highest rated on IMDB - only 1 title shows up in both lists: Friends. Same for IMDB's "movie meter", same applies to the "finale" list as well.

Take the example of Firefly, amazing critical response, 9.2 imdb rating (#23 by user rating, #28 by number of votes, etc), an absolute fanatic fanbase that actually got the show to break Amazon's top 30 dvd sales list 196 weeks after release.

Average viewers? 4.7 million - 98th on the Nielsen list. Cancelled before the first season ended.

Meanwhile NCIS, one of the most predictable middle of the road bore fests gets 17 million average viewers 11 seasons, 2 spinoff series (5 seasons of NCIS:LA averaging 16.5 million viewers) all 3 are ongoing.

Mediocre crap sells because it's cheap to produce, easy to market (cause people know what they're getting), and easy to keep churning out.

I would add that this year, the most commercially successful movies at the cinema have been Captain America, X-Men, Transformers, Spiderman etc. These movies were not cheap to make. Unimaginative, maybe, but not cheap.

No they don't, they gobble down the latest "rushed to the frontpage two minutes before the competition" and after being fed clickbait by clickbait that's wildly misleding they keep coming back for more. You're confusing it with that they want it two seconds after it happened, which is another thing entirely.

people want entertainment that is not formulaic & trite more than ever

The first Transformers movie made $700 million. "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" made $830 million, "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" grossed over a billion dollars and "Transformers: Age of Extincti

not at all. You need to ask yourself who has disposable income. It's mostly teenagers, They're young, and stuff that's repetitious to you is brand new to them. . There's a smattering of young married women (who, as it turns out, make most of the buying decisions in a family after the teenage years, and yes I know not all of them are married any more). But a more discerning is usually made up of middle aged men who don't have much in the form of disposable income (nerds aside)

This topic recently came up on a writers' forum, and someone coughed up some astonishing hard numbers:

Only about 1/2 of 1 percent of American adults read for entertainment. This is probably a fair representation of the literate world at large.

Point being -- print fiction has been a niche market for a long time, with relatively few people interested in it in the first place. That half a percent of a lot of people is still profitable -- well, goes to show the value of niche markets. But expecting it to do mor

I knew one thing: That it doesn't matter whether you pick candidate A or candidate B from The Party. Why the hell should it make any difference? I have to admit, as an European it may be the distance that makes tiny details disappear, but I just can't see the difference between what you claim to be two parties.

Seriously, I watched a "debate" between the candidates (even though I'd be kinda hard pressed to call it a debate when the participating people are not allowed to talk to

Because one group is a bunch of insane goons who'd eat their own babies.

The other group claims to be their polar opposite. They're the insane goons who'd eat YOUR babies. It's got to be one or the other. No room for a middle. Exact opposites! You must choose whether to be one of the "good guys" or one of the "bad guys". You believe in babies, don't you?

Any author can publish nearly anything he wants through Kindle electronically, or CreateSpace in paper and he has control of the price at either one. Both have competitors too, like LightningSource, that have better access to dirt-world bookstores and provide electronic publishing services. If these authors want to be paid more per book, there is not a blessed thing stopping them from doing it right now.

Then the problem is finding good work. Self publishing appears to come with a stigma, and many authors seem to be dismissed from receiving praise because their work is self-published, perhaps with an exception for authors who already had a publisher and have left simply to make money.

Now I know some authors who make some money self-publishing, mostly in niche market areas where it might be easier to get noticed. But, for other markets I think people have become reliant on publishers acting as some sort of m

Self-published books are looked down on for a reason.
I've "bought" some self-published stuff for $0 on amazon.
It's pretty bad.
It's basically as if the author had an idea for a story, put it down on paper, and submitted the pdf.
The stories have potential sometimes, but the writing is just bad.
A mix of short 4 word sentences and half a page run on sentences.
Descriptions that are just repeated every several pages. Whole books written in the format of:
I walked through the door. I looked at the guy. I said this. He said that. I walked back to the other place. I shot the alien. I picked him up.
The alien was gross and ugly. I carried him back to the first place.

Just because you self-publish doesn't mean you don't need an editor.

Be that as it may, those are not the people we are talking about here. The topic is published authors at particular publishing houses whining about the retail price placed on their books. Books which they could have easily published, using exactly the same words, without a "publisher."

They could have, but it would have been a lot more work. At the very minimum, you need to hire a second pair of eyes to proof read your novel before you toss it up on Amazon for anything more than $0. For someone who is going to take it seriously and do it properly, that alone can cost $400-500. At the 99 cent price point, you need to sell nearly a thousand copies just to break even. Unless you're a well known author, the odds of that happening are pretty low.

I agree with you that an editor provides valuable service. This means an author needs to work this service into her budget. How much does it typically cost for a private author, as opposed to a major publisher, to hire an editor?

I took a look Amazon's kindle unlimited this afternoon and what I saw were an incredible number of science fiction authors that I never heard of, pushing out what the blurbs and titles made look like bad romance novels in space.

The functions of the editor and publisher are just missing from this mish mash. If you look at paper publishing it's a large financial commitment to publish and market any given book and most would never pay back the investment. Hence publishers to market the works and editors to select quality material were immensely valuable and helped make certain that if an authors work was published it had a better than random submission chance of earning back it's costs.

Now the cost to "Publsish" as an e-book is minimal and much of what would never have been published in the past is flooding all over the place. So you have lots of "Authors" self publishing and not making money. This really shouldn't come as a shocker. The problem is there are so many of them they overwhelm everything else. If I read correctly Kindle Unlimited has 600,000 titles. It's just numbers but there really just aren't enough people in the world to see that most of those authors make a living from being published there.

I'm inclined to agree with you. As somebody who hopes to one day write a novel (or anything worthwhile, really), I would like to be published by the traditional route as it would be a validation that my book is "good". Of course, I am not dismissing self-publishing. It is a valid strategy if you believe you are good enough. I just know that a publishing house isn't going to pick my book just because. It is going to pick it because it is has chances to sell, which means it is probably better than the average

Amazon has done a TON for indy authors and they've shared their profits. When the big publishers tried to force higher prices on Amazon I stopped buying. You would think these asshats would've learned from the music industry - especially since their wares are so much smaller when downloaded and lose no fidelity at all. Now they've all had to settle for big fines but do you think that this will bring readers back into the fold? I doubt it.

This guy has some interesting information about what's going on with out the big publisher bias - other than the fact that his bias is he hates big publishing lol

I don't think it's as simple as Amazon is good or Amazon is evil. Amazon is powerful, and that needs watching.

Now I have a number writer friends, one of whom is published both with traditional imprints like TOR and with Amazon's new in-house publishing imprints. She has good things to say about Amazon's imprints, but one thing you have to take into account is that nobody will stock your book *but* Amazon if you publish with them. That's giving up a lot, so they treat authors reasonably well. But that doe

Read the blog I linked above. He self publishes on multiple platforms, Amazon doesn't stop him from doing that and in fact he has offered free downloads on his own site for some of the same content he sells on Amazon. If you told him that big publishing did all of those things he would laugh at you. Most of that can be outsourced and if you think the big publishing houses really do much promotion I've got a bridge you might be interested in. Certainly some authors get promoted but only a very select few. Co

I can only go with the experience of my friends, who've gone both routes successfully.

It's true that traditional publishers expect mid-list authors to shoulder most of the promotion efforts these days. I never said they didn't. Fiction authors are now expected to maintain a platform, which used to be a non-fiction thing. Certainly traditional publishers have become more predatory and less supportive than they were twenty years ago. I don't have an inside track on why that is, but I suspect there are seve

I would bet that putting indy author's wares on display would lead to some backlash by big publishers if they found out, not seeing indy publishers who've made a name for themselves on bookshelves doesn't surprise me. As someone who reads books exclusively electronically I've likely lost some touch but the sense I have is that paper is slowly going away and that e-books are now selling well enough that having paper copies produced isn't a "must" in order to make a living. An author's goals play into their c

this sounds great on paper, but in the real world youtube content creators are subject to trolls, prudes, angry bigots, spam, false DMCA notices, people with a lack of humor, and market saturation. youtube starts as profitable but over time the benefits stop rolling in and some people completely go to a less public venue when ironically trying to reach out to new fans, simply because a less public venue will have fewer of these problems at first. online life is not that different from real life, but was of

No, it's not "on paper" and you seem to not know that Jack Conte (half of the duo Pomplamoose) is the CEO of Patreon. Patreon is the child of the experiences that Nataly Dawn and Jack Conte had with Youtube, and my posting of the interview on the BIRN and Nataly's closing of the other video was meant to be informative.

It only takes something like 1000-2000 regular donors to keep a writer in reasonable comfort. In the age of the Internet, that is really not a lot. As good writers want to write and are typically not motivated by money unlike the publishers that just try to get rich on their backs, this is all it takes. Of course, publishers will fight this tooth and nail, as it threatens their existence. An existence that benefits absolutely nobody but themselves though, so their demise will be something eminently welcome. I predict this will not kill all publishers though. There are those that actually respect their authors and customers, are not primarily motivated by money, and have a positive effect on the overall process. These will remain. I doubt however that any of the large publishers will be among the survivors.

It only takes something like 1000-2000 regular donors to keep a writer in reasonable comfort

Put another way, if the median income is $45,000, then 1500 regular donors giving 1/1500th of their annual income or $30/yr each will give an author a median income. (In reality, it's less than 1/1500th because the mean income is higher than the median, so the more affluent donors will allow the author to hit the median income with less than 1/1500th of each donor's income.)

I just checked out Patreon, maybe I'm doing it wrong but when I clicked "writing" I got a mish mash of podcasts, comics, programming projects and art, with little writing to be found. Unless I'm missing a trick here they really need to get their categorisation sorted.

I can't speak for everybody, of course, but I DO let price dictate if I buy a book or not, even if it's an author I love. And if it's a debut author, or one I haven't read before, I'm unlikely to be thrilled with paying $8+ for a book.

The vast majority of the books I read are on the Kindle. The vast majority of those books are either carefully-chosen self-published authors or books either Amazon and/or the publisher is selling for no more than $6. Publishers that want to continue to insist on "charging" more than $10 for a book are collecting precisely $0 of my reading dollars. (Meaning that they'll collect the same amount of money from me pricing e-books at a $1B/copy.)

Self-publishing is really the way to go these days for new authors. The average traditionally-published manuscript makes $0, as the average manuscript isn't picked up by a publisher at all. And the ones that do get published receive far less support from publishers than they used to, as they have so many imprints now that the effort that can be expended on a random debut author is just about zilch; they get a few review copies sent out, minimal editing services, and maybe a short blurb in a trade rag. With that limp level of support, it's not surprising few debut authors clear their initial advance, when they are only clearing 15% royalties.

Contrast that with the 70% (of a lower price) Amazon is offering on anybody that chooses to post a book. The only additional effort authors must expend is doing their own cover and editing. They were already largely responsible for their own promotion anyway, so that doesn't really change.

In the "good 'ol days" publishers served a real function. They provided substantial editing support, decent promotional effort, and were, in any case, the only game in town. Now the number of books published per year by the traditional publishers has gone up, and the services they provide authors have gone down. They have reduced themselves to nothing more than middlemen between authors and retailers. Nowhere but books and music do we tolerate the middlemen taking such a large chunk of the available money for little more than distribution.

Price is definitely a big factor in my own reading decisions as well. As a result of price, I typically go on reading "binges" where I will read something, remember how much I like to read things and go through another few things on my list until I notice I'm thinking about buying something for $14 and I just bought three or four other books in the past couple weeks, and do I really need to read this thing right now? Maybe I can wait until it's been out for a little bit and see if my library gets it or th

Publishers that want to continue to insist on "charging" more than $10 for a book are collecting precisely $0 of my reading dollars.

Where did you get $10 as your price ceiling? For example, if you attend school and discover that a class you're taking requires a textbook that costs more than $10, do you drop that class? I say this in the context of having bought a DRM-free copy of Edenics, an etymological science fiction book by Isaac Mozeson, for $15.

And we even know why: market invisible hand theory relies on a few assumptions, one of them being that products are identical and that buyers' choices are only driven by price. Once we say that "book prices don't seem to be the deciding factor on whether someone reads a book", we know it will not work. If producing books is considered important, then the market should be regulated.

AFAIK, eBook sales went up to around 15% and stayed there. Does anyone have any more up to date info? Of course Amazon reports that its sales overtook physical books but that's the business they're in and it isn't representative of sales overall.

I love gadgets and totally get the potential for eReaders and eBooks, however, my experiences with them have been so poor (buying, reading, trying to find passages to cite, dealing with DRM, etc.) that I only buy physical books now. Even with academic papers, I'd ra

With e-books becoming more dominant and less money coming into the industry, the bookstores die (they're already highly marginal now). With bookstores' death, so go the publishers (after all, any established author will make more money from self-publishing and now the *one* (incredibly important) thing the publishers offer - shelf space - is gone).

With publishers gone, we all essentially become slush pile readers. The books are nearly free, but the constraint is *time*, not money, and with the publishers gone, we're now looking at instead of 1 in 10 new books being decent, we're looking at 1 in 1,000. And quite frankly, there's movies and Angry Birds on our e-book readers that have a much higher payoff rate.

Established authors do okay, but the discovery rate of new authors drops like a stone. Sure a handful get discovered each year, but the current book industry discovers thousands each year. (Where discover means they are distinguished enough from the crowd to have a *chance* at success.) As there are fewer and fewer new authors making it (but more and more authors writing for at least a generation while writing is culturally relevant), the signal to noise ratio keeps dropping.

Even worse, businesses realize that while selling books doesn't make much money, selling services to desperate authors makes a killing. If you are browsing to find a new author you know nothing about, Amazon currently shows us the top 1,000 or so books from mainstream publishers, with a few self-published in the mix. At some point, it makes a *lot* more money by showing us the top 1,000 books from the authors willing to pay the most.

And unfortunately, unlike mainstream publishers, who invest in a book not because they love it, but because they believe it will be what you want to read, would-be self-published authors aren't buying advertising based on the books quality, but on their own personal resources.

Amazon, et al. will make a lot of money for decades even as the book market to readers collapse.

Of course, old favorites won't disappear. They'll be a handful of new discoveries each year from self-publishing. Enough that books won't be "dead". But the idea that book reading will become marginal enough that it's cultural significance will essentially be irrelevant.

Professional editing isn't just about the appearance of a text on the page, it can also be about making the text coherent and understandable. Kindle-only books on Amazon are often riddled with errors like one passage accidently moved to the wrong part of the book by a careless cut-and-paste operation, a footnote number linking to a different footnote that has nothing to do with the passage in question, or confusing, non-standard terminology for the field in quetion. Sometimes hyperlinks, whether because of improper formatting or negligence on the part of the publisher, don't go to the external sites they should. A spellchecker doesn't catch any of this.

Furthermore, even within ebook publishing, there is still a need for someone more computer savvy than the average author to have a look at the manuscript. For hyphenation to work correctly in next-generation e-readers (ditto for audiobook support), someone has to tag foreign-language words with the right ISO-639 tags. Image floating is still difficult to get right and requires some human intervention.

Finnegans Wake (note that there is no apostrophe) is entirely coherent and enjoyable as long as one has the linguistic background to understand the constant (and rather tiresome) punning in the book. In any event, this particular book is a case for the value of editors, as the Rose & Oâ(TM)Hanlon edition is vastly superior to the error-ridden text now in the public domain and widely sold.

This. As is often the case with/., it's an all or nothing deal. There's no way in hell that anything the publishers or record labels provide the authors and artists could actually be worthwhile. What antiquated notion! Anybody can produce a bestseller in their bedroom or record the best label of the year in their garage.

Editors are very important. They're the sanity check of the author. They're a reliable and honest reader. They help form the books by taking the often jumbled and incoherent source materi

Editors are very important. They're the sanity check of the author. They're a reliable and honest reader. They help form the books by taking the often jumbled and incoherent source material that was jotted down in hundreds of sittings, sometimes in the wrong order, and shaping that into the final product.

If actual editing was still happening, I would agree with you - but my experience as an avid reader tells me publishers stopped doing any significant editing 20-30 years ago.

If actual editing was still happening, I would agree with you - but my experience as an avid reader tells me publishers stopped doing any significant editing 20-30 years ago.

They're depending on the author's agent to handle that now, and hand them a complete book ready to send for typesetting. It doesn't always work out...

And with some authors you can see that as they got famous they got to tell the editor to get lost a lot more. JK Rowling is a great example-- the early books were fun reads and short. As the franchise got bigger, the books got longer and lots of fluff got left in. She also would introduce new characters at the drop of a plot hole, then abandon them later wi

The tactile experience of actually holding a book in your hand, being able to flip the pages, is far better than anything offered by current electronic devices. Sure, the various e-readers are convenient, but convenience isn't everything. Book printing and book reading aren't disappearing anytime soon. In fact, I'm seeing more small bookstores pop up as people realize the limitations of the online experience and go back to browsing.

That's strange, there's so many sites like metacritic, reddit, and even slashdot that allow people to rate the content they view/read. Too bad this can't be applied to books.

And notice that despite hundreds of thousands of self-published books, it's not occurring now... Ever considered asking why?

Almost nobody is willing to spend 100-200 hours to find a single book worth reviewing. And, sadly, the very few people who might be willing to do so on an occasional basis are completely eclipsed by desperate aut

BIG bookstores are dying. The independent bookstores seem to be multiplying, after what seemed like iminent death at the hands of Borders, B&N and BAM.

Borders is gone. B&N is smaller, and BAM is simply disgusting and I won't go there ever again after going there once (it's a southern 'christian' company and it shows, especially in the whole two shelves of science books they had - I re-shelved Behe's "darwin's black box" in Fantasy). And when I was at BAM, I swear it was a

BIG bookstores are dying. The independent bookstores seem to be multiplying, after what seemed like iminent death at the hands of Borders, B&N and BAM.

Could you please cite evidence for this "renaissance"? While local smaller bookstores are hanging on, they aren't surviving as bookstores per se: they have massively cut the floor space dedicated to books and instead are selling hipster accoutrements: tea sets, Lomography cameras, vinyl records, and hip stationary. Reading is down considerably in recent

Way to misquote me. I never said that such shops were "only for hipsters". However, there's no denying that in certain markets, hipsters make up a powerful consumer force, and a shop can stay afloat by expanding its stock to meet their demand. However, I do wonder what will happen to these shops when fashion changes, as it inevitably will.

Brick and mortar retail is still there and taking up more real-estate than ever.

Yeah, I'm still waiting for a citation that the amount of floor space dedicated to books i

Damn, son, do you have any reading comprehension skills? Of course I mentioned hipsters. The point of my post above was that offering non-book items of interest to this lucrative demographic is one major way that bookstores are staying afloat. But how you got from that to your misquote "Indie bookstores are only for hipsters" is beyond me: bookstores continue to offer items that interest non-hipsters, but they simply aren't as powerful a profit centre.

"Of course, old favorites won't disappear. They'll be a handful of new discoveries each year from self-publishing. Enough that books won't be "dead". But the idea that book reading will become marginal enough that it's cultural significance will essentially be irrelevant."

More books or at least book-length works are being published now than in the past. So a few percentage of good books out of a couple of million bad books is still a lot.

This development parallells the development of culture in other fields

But the idea that book reading will become marginal enough that it's cultural significance will essentially be irrelevant.
i.e. like poetry

Well, that's different; people don't read poetry now because no one is writing good poetry anymore. At best you'll get something on level of Longfellow's Hiawatha, but I can't think of any recent poetry that even reaches that level.

The reason poetry is dead is because of writers, not because people aren't willing to read it.

Indeed, in order to be happy, you must Consume. Consume, Consumer! Consume! I command it! Waste all your money! Consume, Consume, Consume!

There's no purpose to money if it isn't making you happy. Indeed, what *isn't* a waste of money?

And sadly for my heirs, I am not one of those who is made happy simply by seeing a large number just sitting there in my bank account deposit book while I sit on a park bench with a discarded newspaper for company:-).

What makes me happy is financial independence. I save a large majority of my income, invest it, and spend extremely little compared to most others that make as much as I do all so I can retire 30 years before any of them likely do, without even taking into account social security.

The real problem is that people do not live within their means (which includes saving and investing money) and buy things that do not truly make them happy. I seriously doubt you're any less happy when you aren't able to spend mone

My issue with subscriptions is that companies tend to not pay the content makers much.

In the past, you made an album as a musician, you got $10-$15.

You are correct that companies don't pay content producers enough. However, your knowledge of how things 'used to be' is badly flawed.

No one in the history of the music industry has ever gotten paid $10 per album sold. Even the biggest names rarely get as much as $2. Many 'big name' artists have sold millions of albums and were paid as little as 50 cents per album.

Not even big musicians ever got $10-$15. Artists typically would get anywhere from 8 to 14 percent and major stars would get 20 percent of album sales. Even after inflation adjustments you're only talking about $5 per album at the high end. What happened was album prices went down - If albums stayed in line with inflation they'd be $100 per album now. http://theunderstatement.com/p... [theunderstatement.com]

Book prices are going the opposite direction! A mass market paperback in 1975 cost $1.35, adjusted for inflation that's about $5.97. The average mass market price now? Around $8. 25% higher. The issue with books is that publishers create these insane contracts to allow them to suck every last penny out before cutting a royalty cheque. So if you take the adjusted amount a 1975 author could typically expect $0.59 per copy sold, today's author should be able to expect $0.80 per copy sold right? In reality because of the contract loopholes they end up getting at most $0.32 per copy sold.

So authors are typically being payed 60-70% less than in 1975. In addition to this the number of titles published per year has skyrocketed - 135,000 titles are published every year now. That's a lot of competition just within the industry let alone competing for peoples most valuable thing: time. There's going to be a major contraction in the book market to correct for this regardless of what Amazon does.

That actually isn't what Happend at all. You need to go further back than 1998.

Not to mention that your prices are way off - someone like Madonna gets $4-5 bucks an album, and that's the super-high end.

Cheap singles are nothing new. Singles drove the industry from the 60's through the 80's. Then labels slowly stopped releasing singles, forcing folks to buy an entire album for one song. This really hit the mainstream when Britney Spears first album, "...Baby One More Time". The title song was a huge radio and MTV hit, but it was unavailable as a single, and was only available when they finally dropped the album, forcing folks to buy the whole album to get the song (with the album filled largely with filler like "Email My Heart"). This resulted in an instant #1 album.

By holding back singles, they forced folks to spend much more on albums, which became standard practice - and it's no coincidence that this coincided with the rise of Napster because it was the only way folks could just get one single song without spending $15-20. It was a direct response to taking away choice from the market place.

There is a lot more to it before and after, but that's the basic gist - how the labels basically created the whole download environment by manipulating the market just as the technology became available to circumnavigate the entire thing. Since then they have played catch up and obviously largely lost in the long run.

This is also why your average AAA-list concert act sells tickets starting at $150-300 - because the record companies don't get a cut of that, and it's where they make the bulk of their money. Not that it hasn't always really been that way, of course.

It takes time and effort to create a novel - even a crappy one. One of the authors that I read frequently puts out about two novels per year and spends 40-50 hours per week writing. It takes me a weekend to read her novel. Even if a musician gets $0.05/track, they get something and they can play a concert and sell t-shirts, or fan club memberships, etc. What can an author do? They don't do public performances, or have fan clubs, or sell T-shirts.

In a interview a few years ago with Ani DiFranco, the report was gushing on how much higher her margins, as a independent artist, than The Dave Mathew Band. Which made DiFranco laugh because The Dave Mathew Band was making so much more money. DiFranco pointed out that going independent was about freedom of control not about the money.

It is not about margins it is about market structure. Piracy has trained consumers that music should be cheap.

You're right. But most of the rest of them got big-enough advances from record labels though so that they could try making music for a living for a couple years. The money for those advances came from record sales of the few acts that did make it. Now, there's little money coming in from record sales from the acts that made it - only peasly subscription revenue and $0.99 tracks. Less money coming into the labels, less money going out as advances to artists.

You're right. But most of the rest of them got big-enough advances from record labels though so that they could try making music for a living for a couple years. The money for those advances came from record sales of the few acts that did make it. Now, there's little money coming in from record sales from the acts that made it - only peasly subscription revenue and $0.99 tracks. Less money coming into the labels, less money going out as advances to artists.

Having known musicians that have landed contracts, they do NOT give you enough to live on at all. They give you enough to get some new equipment, then gouge them with paying them for the studio, recording, editing, graphics, videos, etc. All which have to be pay back (and you are paying more if you would of found your own places to do that stuff).

And record companies are still making plenty of money selling stuff these days.

"eBook publishers aren't even needed. Software to convert DOC/LaTeX to ePub &c. will do the trick, with proofreaders/editors employed separately, and hosting services a dime a dozen. All that remains is a searchable database, which is a high school project."

That's Calibre, database included. With a few torrents you have the library of congress on your machine.

That is how I published my PhD. The "publisher" took a small cut to get it an ISBN and to have it added to some catalogs, but proposed a very reasonably priced printer that he has a deal with for it. (Physical copies were mandatory.) All rights for electronic publishing remain with me. The book itself is LaTeX, and for proofreading, I paid $1000 to a lady that offers this as a service and did a pretty good job of it. A fiction author could possibly get away with having some loyal fans do the proofreading fo

Apart from distribution, publishers used to perform two important services: editing manuscripts into something enjoyable to read, and promoting worthy books. How would Amazon prefer that those services be performed?

I'm a small publisher, and we give good royalties to our authors (we provide actual publishing services free up front to the authors in return for the part of the sale we keep). They get a bigger royalty from our website than anywhere else (because it's just split between us and them). We sell everything DRM free in multiple formats and explicitly tell users they can format shift. You can figure out the name of the company from my username if you care to go and buy some books.